Lesson 1/30/12

After my lesson being cancelled last week, I was very eager to ride last night. I rode Kilo again, but this week my lesson was at 5:30 because my instructor has been trying to combine lessons to make it easier. So it was darker and colder when I rode, but it actually wasn't that bad. This week I rode with three other people, one of which is actually one of the girls who rode a lesson I used to volunteer at.

Also new this week was that I had to put a breastplate (see the picture) on Kilo. It's used to keep the saddle in place on the horse's back and to prevent it from sliding backward. Basically you put on the saddle and the girth, thread the bottom loop of the breastplate through the girth (between the horse's two front legs), and clip the top two clips to the saddle. Hopefully you can see that a little in the picture.

Since there were so many people in the lesson, I basically got to do my own thing to warm up. I just did some circles and basically went where there weren't other people riding. After a while our instructor told us to do a three-loop serpentine, just looping around the ring in a figure-eight sort of motion. It was a little tricky to do this without running into other horses, so a lot of the time we had to loop back or cut across the ring.

After about four full serpentines around the ring, we were told to trot. I got Kilo to trot fairly easily, and he actually went along at a nice pace for the majority of the time. The only time it got hard to keep Kilo trotting was where the ground was especially hard and frozen. At those spots he would slow down and I would have to just push him along until he went faster. For a while I was actually the only one trotting, because the other horses kept having problems for some reason. Of course, then I started to have problems.

After trotting so nicely for so long, Kilo just kind of stopped trotting, and he would not pick up another trot. I wiggled my legs, a nudged him, and then finally kicked him a little, and he still would not trot. Eventually my instructor noticed and gave me a crop to use, which got Kilo into a trot soon after. For the rest of the time Kilo and I trotted comfortably (at least I did) until the end of the lesson. Down at the barn the instructor said that my ride was very nice, and I have to say I agree. What I mean by that is it felt really good to ride after missing a week, and I felt like I accomplished a lot and got more comfortable trotting on Kilo.